A visit to Haandbryggeriet

On Friday I went to Drammen for a tour of Haandbryggeriet, one of the
new Norwegian craft brewers. We were treated to a tour round the
brewer itself, got to taste four of their beers, and then went pub
crawling in Drammen. The tour is a standard
service offered by the brewery, and we were told they have groups
coming about once a week. At 80 NOK per person it's a really good
offer in my opinion.

Our guide around the brewery was Rune Eriksen, one of the four
owners of the brewery. He freely answered all our questions (of which
there were a lot), and was joined toward the end by Jens Maudal, the
main brewer.

After the tasting

The brewery

The brewery itself is located in an old knitting factory that Jens
Maudal inherited from his parents, and ran for a long time before it
closed. The brewery equipment they bought in England for NOk 140,000,
which they thought was rather cheap. From what I remember,
Nøgne Ø spent about the same
amount on their first brewery, but as they bought old dairy parts they
did a lot of work to assemble a brewery from it all.

The brewery is pretty small: they produced just 40,000 liters last
year. The maximum capacity of the current equipment is 80,000 liters,
but they said they could easily double that. Still, in order to
provide a living for two people (Jens and Rune) they'd have to produce
roughly 200,000 liters a year.

Right to left: mash tun, boiling pan, fermentation tank

They buy 5-6 different kinds of malts from abroad, all of it floor
malted, which makes it high quality, but also expensive. They crush
the malt themselves in a German-bought malt mill, which then
transports the crushed malt up through the wall and dumps it into the
mash tun in the next room. The mash tun holds about 900 liters, so the
maximum size of their batches is slightly less than that, as the tun
has to hold both the water and the malts.

From the mash tun the beer goes to the boiling pan, and from there
to a fermentation tank. It seems they have three sets of fermentation
tanks, which confuses me a bit. I must have missed out on something
during that part of the tour. The beer spends about two weeks in the
fermentation tanks. They have a cooling system for the fermentation
tanks, which allows them to lower the temperature if needed, but it's
not powerful enough that they can make lager beers.

Once fermentation is over the beer is mixed with yeast and sugar
and bottled. The purpose of adding sugar and yeast is to get a second
fermentation in the bottle to produce natural CO2 in the bottle. They
have an automated bottling machine which must be a major time-saver.
From the bottling machine the bottles go into a labelling machine, and
then they are put in cardboard boxes and stacked in the brewery. The
beer has to mature in bottles for about a week before it's ready to be
sent out.

Fermentation tanks

The whole process from they arrive in the brewery in the morning
until the beer is safely in the fermentation tank, and everything is
clean again takes about 7-8 hours. From then it's another three weeks
before the bottled beer is actually ready for sale.

News

The most exciting part of the visit was perhaps to get some
information on their upcoming beers. Two of them ( London
Porter, and Pale
Ale) have been listed on RateBeer.com for a while now, but they have (as far as I know)
not actually been distributed yet. They both have 4.5% alcohol, since
they were created to be sold in Norwegian shops.

More interesting is the line of four other beers they have been
putting together. They started making beers that were less challenging
than those from Nøgne Ø, but they've found that abroad people want
craft beers to be more challenging. So they've decided to make some
products that cater to this need as well, and these are:

Dark Force

This is a wheat stout, which they struggled a bit to describe,
saying it was "strange, unusual stuff". It's brewed with 50% wheat
malts, but was supposed to be a stout in other respects.

Norwegian Wood

This was an experimental brew, using smoked malts, and also
juniper for flavouring.

These all sound like very interesting beers, and I'm really looking
forward to trying them. They couldn't tell us where we'd be able to
find these beers in Norway, though. "Probably in bars and
restaurants," they said. It sounded like they expected to export most
of it. The most interesting piece of news was about a beer we'd heard
rumours about for a while, called "Haandbach". The name is a
pun on Rodenbach Grand Cru. It's meant to be a cross between a
Flemish red
ale and a
lambik, and is going
to mature at least 12 months in wine vats.

No such luck, I'm afraid. The Haandbach wasn't ready (and in the vats, anyway). The Norwegian Wood was in fermentation, I think, and from what I gathered they hadn't brewed the Double Dose yet. I think I saw boxes labelled Dark Force, but they may not have been ready.

Morten E - 2007-01-22 22:27:57

Nice blog, and excellent report from Haandbryggeriet. But seriously, does visiting 2 pubs qualify as a pub crawl? ;oP